Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Should we start them on Haskell or Lisp?

Get them ready for the real world... PHP and Java + Enterprise Patterns should be required reading for EVERY four year old.

Please start with the "Gang of Four"; perhaps the title will trick them into thinking it's about a gang of four year olds?

I sometimes ask new parents if they'll choose English or C as the first foreign language.

So far nobody has opted for C.

How exactly do you (we?) expect someone who doesn't know English to become a programmer?

Sorry to break it to you, but you can't have one without the other.

I knew what most of the BASIC keywords did on the computer before I understood their meaning in english. I'm not sure I even completely grasped that they were words in a language until then.

But yeah, english is pretty undisputed as the lingua franca of most things computer, and so developing professionally beyond a certain threshold is difficult without english.

I've seen French and German code that got by with no significant English (outside whatever wrapped the core functions). It's easier in some languages than in others.

Back in the good old BASIC days, there were even hacks to make those tokenizing interpreters on home computers use German symbols for their keywords. (nice side effect of the tokenized representation: the code remained compatible)

Excel and {Open,Libre}Office Calc work with localized symbols for their functions, too.

I think I've even seen a C header file that wrapped keywords (through macros), types and libc names in translated versions. Luckily those are rare...

So, programming without English is possible - but I really wouldn't recommend it.

I learnt how to program before learning English. Most of my colleagues aren't really fluent in English, and yet they can write code.

Fortunately I only ask people who understand that it's a joke.

That's why we have assembly instructions. Hex-values are language agnostic

Its because C is a bad first language, I remember when I first started programming what was really exciting to me was seeing something working. Beyond simple "hello world" type applications, C is going to take a lot more work. Its a great language, very useful for building things. However what makes it great is what makes it bad for first timers.

C#, or javascript, maybe python would be good languages in my opinion.

That's the joke /wolfcastle.

If that's your criteria for a good first language, then I'd say shell script. You already need to know a subset of the shell and its commands anyway, to be able to use the computer in the first place. So from there, learning the programming-language aspects of it is a natural progression.

I'd say basic logic should come first. Then counting in binary, etc.

BASIC was made for beginners ;)

> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

There are a lot of really good Dijkstra quotes. That isn't one of them.

I didn't mod you down, but it's worth pointing out that the versions of BASIC that Dijkstra was referring to are now dead. Without special effort and probably running an emulator, you will not be able to run an unstructured BASIC where goto is the primary control flow mechanism. It's all structured, as in "structured programming", now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com